What a day it is when we must envy the men in their graves.
By common consent, gray hairs are a crown of glory: the only object of respect that can never excite envy.
We are constantly telling ourselves what we most want to know, and at the same time are deaf to it. Why does envy have such a fierce bite? Why do we fall silent or get worried just as our story is about to spring out of our control and into its own life? Whose shadow falls across the page?
So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.
The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.
Envy is what makes you, when an acquaintance is lustily telling you that she's dating a Greek god of a guy, ask, 'Which one, Hades?'
Riches do not exhilarate us so much with their possession as they torment us with their loss.
Envy nobody. It is the true secret of happiness, or at least the only one I know. (By Moonlight)
In the affairs of this world, poverty alone is without envy.
Envy, like a cold prison, benumbs and stupefies; and, conscious of its own impotence, folds its arms in despair.
There is almost a touch of condescension in the act of hiring friends that secretly afflicts them. The injury will come out slowly: A little more honesty, flashes of resentment and envy here and there, and before you know it your friendship fades. The more favors and gifts you supply to revive the friendship, the less gratitude you receive.
We love much better those who endeavor to imitate us, than those who strive to equal us. For imitation is a sign of esteem, but competition of envy.
God is growing bitter, He envies man his mortality.
Death opens the gate of fame, and shuts the gate of envy after it; it unlooses the chain of the captive, and puts the bondsman's task into another man's hand.
To feel envy is human, to savour schadenfreude is devilish
Three be the things I shall never attain: Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.
I envy people who can think, 'No, I'm not going to work today' when they have a huge pile of deadlines stacking up.
Envy lurks at the bottom of the human heart like a viper in its hole.
I envy the poet. He is encouraged toward drunkenness and wallows with nubile wenches while the painter must endure wretchedness and pain for his art.
Wherever I find envy I take a pleasure in provoking it: I always praise before an envious man those who make him grow pale.